Young V&A museum to open after three-year, £13m makeover

The Young V&A in Bethnal Green will replace the V&A Museum of Childhood when it opens on July 1, following a three-year £13 million makeover - the biggest transformation in the museum’s 150-year life span. 

Co-designed with children, the centre aims to support the next generation of creative minds, from artists and designers to performers and creative practitioners and will include an extensive range of voices amongst its initiatives, from Quentin Blake and Linda McCartney to the XR Families Group and voices from the early 1900s suffrage movement. 

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View of the pre-walker and toddler zone of the Play Gallery (Image: Victoria and Albert Museum)

Even if you don't have a budding Van Gogh or Emma Thompson - a patron of the museum - on your hands, Young V&A will still be an interactive space in which kids can get creatively wild.

The museum has been shaped around the interests of children and young teens, aged between newborn to 14-years-old and designed to encourage playful learning and to spark imaginations. 

Based on early years' development, the centre has three galleries - Play, Imagine and Design which aim to foster creative confidence. 

View of the Games room in the Play Gallery at Young V&A. (Image: Victoria and Albert Museum)

There's sensory playscapes for tiny tots and toddlers, story-telling spaces for early readers and writers and an open design studio where children can learn from leading designers. 

Children can also have a go at the finger skateboard park, build stuff in the Imagination Playground construction zone, go nuts in a sandpit and discover stories about young people everywhere who are bossing it in general and creatively such as Greta Thunberg whose climate-related works will be on display on opening. 

View across the Adventure display in the Imagine Gallery (Image: Victoria and Albert Museum)

These stories will feature alongside 2,000 highlights from the V&A's art, design and performance collection and will cover a broad scope of artists and creative things, such as Keith Haring, the Surrealists as well as Minecraft and Superheroes. 

There's also contemporary displays and a games design space for teens, and the first exhibition for the centre is Japan: Myths to Manga (opening October 14), which will cover Studio Ghibli, Pokémon and manga-inspired fashion.  

View into the Living Together display in the Imagine Gallery (Image: Victoria and Albert Museum)

Through the likes of Studio Ghibli films, Comme de Garçons, Noritaka Tatehana's inventive heel-less shoes and a moving installation of 1,000 cranes, the exhibition explores how Japanese landscapes and folklore have influenced pop culture, technology and design.